Innovation is path to success, 800 hear at Detroit Policy Conference

5:12 PM, February 27, 2014

Thomas Sugrue

Detroit Free Press Business Writer

Maggie DeSantis CQes has been the executive director of the Warren/Connor Development Coalition for the past 20 years. DeSantis has been trying to get control and develop the area of Mack and Alter since 1987 and persistence has paid off. The Mack Alter Square will be complete by the Summer of 2005. The stores will have a food store, banking and a police mini station to name a few. The area use to have abandoned homes and businesses until the development coalition stepped in. Photographed on Friday, November 5, 2004. ERIC SEALS/Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press

The New Economy Initiative, a collaboration by several foundations to re-invent Detroit’s economic base, announced the rollout of Startgrid to connect entrepreneurs with resources. Entrepreneurs and resource providers will be able to connect through the website www.startgrid.com.

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Innovation and re-invention were the watchwords Thursday at the Detroit Regional Chamber’s annual Detroit Policy Conference at MotorCity Casino.

“We do not lack resources. We lack inventive ideas,” Maggie DeSantis, president of the Warren-Conner Development Coalition and a longtime Detroit activist, told a panel on neighborhood revitalization at the daylong event.

She was speaking directly to the question of revitalization of vacant land, but her call for imaginative solutions to Detroit’s problems was echoed by many others throughout the day.

Benjamin Kennedy, deputy director for Detroit programs with the Kresge Foundation, called for the city to engage in even more partnerships with foundations and groups like the Detroit Future City Implementation Office than it already does.

“That’s the type of partnership that I think is going to define public-sector involvement in revitalization,” Kennedy said.

Thomas Sugrue, a professor and author of the book “The Origins of the Urban Crisis,” which traced Detroit’s downfall, also urged more regional cooperation in southeast Michigan.

“Don’t go it alone,” he said in a keynote address. “The region matters now more than ever. Detroit has the will, but not the resources to go it alone.”

Calling downtown redevelopment “absolutely necessary but far from sufficient,” Sugrue also urged his listeners to beware of what he called “hipsterfication,” or the over-reliance on artists and other young creative people to save a city like Detroit.

Hip enclaves like parts of Midtown Detroit are too small to impact the wider city, he said.

Also at the conference, Dave Egner, executive director of the New Economy Initiative, a collaboration by several foundations to re-invent Detroit’s economic base, announced NEI would give the chamber $100,000 to roll out Startgrid, a California-based initiative to connect entrepreneurs with resources.

Entrepreneurs and resource providers will be able to connect through the website www.startgrid.com.

The Detroit Policy Conference is a companion to the chamber’s annual policy conference on Mackinac Island that deals mainly with statewide issues. The Detroit conference drew a record crowd of more than 800 people this year.